Kai Kobayashi
Composer | Pianist
Kai Kobayashi born in Tokyo in 1991, began playing the piano at the age of six. She has been invited to more than 150 concerts so far, including as a soloist with the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra. At the age of 18 she began to learn composition theory.
She completed her bachelor’s degree at Tokyo College of Music in 2016 and began her master’s degree there under Shin-ichirō Ikebe, Michio Kitazume, Tomiko Kōhjiba and Keiko Harada. In 2017, after completing her second master’s semester in Tokyo, she changed to Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and completed her master’s degree with Franz Martin Olbrisch, Manos Tsangaris and Mark Andre.
She is now based in Berlin.
Her artistic involvement in social issues, that she has touched herself since the beginning of her career as a composer, has continued recently in new forms of experimental music theater.
She received the Set-Piece Prize of the PTNA Piano Competition Japan 2015. In the same year she took part in the DAAD-supported international exchange project with Hochschule für Musik Würzburg. She also attended Darmstadt Summer Course in 2016 and her piece was selected in a workshop by Brian Ferneyhough. Her works have been performed by MDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble El Perro Andaluz, Ensemble LUX:NM, Ensemble KNM Berlin, Ensemble Ilinx and more. She was selected as a composer for akademie kontemporär 2021 in Hamburg.
Currently she is studying as a postgraduate student (Konzertexamen) at Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg with Gordon Kampe, and also as a master’s student at University of Arts Berlin focusing experimental music theater with Daniel Ott, founded by Deutschlandstipendium.
Kai Kobayashi 